Emily Keller-O'Donnell, Data Journalist

Earthquake risk data for Washington public schools is incomplete and out of reach

Hundreds of public schools across Washington are located in areas where they could suffer damage in a major earthquake. But more than a decade after the state set out to evaluate school seismic risks, the information is difficult to access and harder to verify.

In the last school year, more than 378,000 students attended schools with buildings constructed before the adoption of modern seismic codes and that have no risk evaluations or retrofits, according to data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction obtained through a public records request. The majority of seismic risk data collected by school districts and the state is not shared with the public.

An additional 167,000 students attended schools already assessed as having “high” or “very high” seismic risks, based on their locations and building conditions.

Compiling the school seismic data is aimed at determining the scope of vulnerabilities across the state to prioritize building improvements and to inform emergency planning. 

 

Continue reading in the Washington State Standard.

This article was republished by Cascade PBS, ParentMap, The Columbian, Seattle’s Child, the Daily Record (Ellensburg), My Edmonds News, The Leader (Port Townsend), Lynnwood Today, MLT News (Mountlake Terrace), The Chronicle (Centralia), Gorge Country Media, and the Longview News-Journal.

 

As Washington Students Head Back to Class, Seismic Building Data is Hard to Find

As the start of the upcoming school year approaches, many students in Washington State will be attending schools that may be unsafe in a major earthquake. However, following years of modernization efforts and millions of dollars spent on renovations and reconstruction to enable school buildings to better withstand a major tremor, information about the seismic readiness of school buildings remains difficult to obtain. While information is available on a case-by-case basis depending on the district, there is no publicly available state database to search for individual schools, and the available resources are sometimes out of date.

Read the full article here.

Seismic Retrofitting of Washington State Schools Would Cost Billions

The passage of a Washington State bill providing planning and construction funds to protect K-12 public schools against earthquake destruction came as welcome news last year. The bill’s passage followed the completion of the School Seismic Safety Project (SSSP), which provided geological and engineering assessments of 561 school buildings, and rated 93 percent of those buildings with just 1 out of 5 stars for structural safety using national seismic evaluation criteria.

The SSSP assessed approximately 14 percent of the state's more than 4,000 school buildings for grades K-12 from across the state. The school selection criteria included a higher proportion of buildings constructed prior to the adoption of modern seismic standards in 1998, and those that are located in tsunami inundation zones, as identified by the Washington Geological Survey. Overall, 63 percent of the assessed buildings were found to have a "high" or "very high" seismic risk, compared with “moderate” or “lower” risks.

Read the full article here.

Virginia, the Data Center Capital of the World, Has a Higher Percentage of Households Without Internet Than Most U.S. States

Survey results from the U.S. Census showed a higher percentage of households in Virginia lacked home Internet access in November 2021 than at any other point in which data was collected over the last ten years. About 34 percent of households in Virginia said they did not have home Internet access, second only to Idaho (39 percent) and Nebraska (37 percent). On average, 23 percent of U.S. households said they did not have home Internet in the 2021 survey.

This comes as the number of data centers providing global Internet access have grown significantly across the region, making Northern Virginia the world leader in the prevalence of data center operations and construction, as measured by the number of data centers and their total power capacity.

Read the full article here.

2022 DSSG Teams Present Their Final Project Results

Student fellows at the University of Washington Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program presented the results of their 10-week summer projects on August 17th. The fellows conducted their work on four interdisciplinary teams, working with project leads and data scientists. 

Read the full article at eScience News here.

Interdisciplinary Team Creates Tool to Detect and Quantify Satellite Streaks

The recent growth of low-Earth-orbit satellites is posing a threat to a range of groups who rely on the sky for science, spirituality and tradition, by leaving a plethora of bright streaks across the night sky. A project team at the University of Washington Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program is working this summer to create a satellite streak detection algorithm that will serve as a tool for quantifying changes in the sky. This tool is aimed at supporting people in astronomy and other fields to take steps to mitigate the prevalence of streaks and their negative effects.

Read the full article at eScience News here.

Research Team Examines the Impacts of Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance on Household-Level Poverty

Research about the relationship between poverty and the minimum wage in Seattle has often focused on examining the economic circumstances of individual workers. One of the projects of the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) summer program at the University of Washington is expanding this lens to create data that views workers as household members, to provide greater context about the role of individual wages in reducing poverty in the region.

Read the full article at eScience News here.

Interdisciplinary Team Designs Database to Advance ‘Self-Sufficiency Standard’ Research

Determining the income level that working families need to meet their basic needs requires a dynamic approach. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Washington (UW) Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program is laying the groundwork for the integration of multi-sourced data from across the U.S. to provide researchers and policy makers with an expanded breadth of opportunities for analyzing complex information in new ways.

The project is centered on designing and testing a database for the Self-Sufficiency Standard, a project of the Center for Women’s Welfare at the UW School of Social Work that determines the income level required for working families to meet their minimum basic needs, based on family composition, children’s ages, and geographic differences in the cost of living. The Standard provides an alternative to the Official Poverty Measure that is currently used to calculate eligibility for benefits such as housing subsidies and food assistance across the U.S.

Read the full article at eScience News here.

Applying ‘Geospatial First’ Approach to Estimating Heating Loads in Alaska

Decarbonization efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change face a unique challenge in Alaska. While about 70 percent of energy use in the state goes to heating, there is a lack of reliable broad-scale data on the portion of energy that is used for heating in buildings. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Washington Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program is working to create an improved method for estimating thermal energy use in buildings in the Alaska Railbelt and Arctic regions, to support these efforts.

Read the full article at eScience News here.

Data Science for Social Good Teams Present Their Project Results

On August 18th, student fellows at the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program presented the results of their 10-week summer projects on the topics of fairness in computational redistricting, and the impacts of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance in relation to residential displacement and commuting patterns. The student fellows conducted their work on two interdisciplinary teams, working with project leads and data scientists. 

Read the full article at eScience News here.